Vehicle manufacturers assemble vehicles that use telematics units and cellular telephony to wirelessly communicate voice conversations and data to locations away from the vehicle. These vehicles and vehicle telematics units may be uniformly assembled at a central location and then delivered to locations all over the world. When vehicles arrive at their destination after assembly, the vehicles are likely to be optimized to operate using the most up-to-date cellular protocols in use at the time of vehicle assembly. Up-to-date cellular protocols can help the vehicle telematics unit provide the fastest data transfer speeds and the lowest latency during the delivery of services.
However, each delivery location may use a different cellular telephony provider that implements a cellular protocol having various levels of sophistication. The vehicle may be delivered to a location where the cellular provider uses a cellular protocol that is less sophisticated or up-to-date relative to what the vehicle telematics unit is optimized to use. In that case, the vehicle telematics unit of the vehicle may attempt to use the most up-to-date cellular protocol by default despite an inability of the local cellular provider to provide cellular service using the most up-to-date cellular protocol. As part of attempting to use the most current or up-to-date cellular protocol as a default choice, the vehicle telematics unit may suffer delays when communicating voice/data. These delays may result from high levels of latency as the unit attempts to first establish service using the default up-to-date cellular protocol before successfully establishing service using the less sophisticated cellular protocol offered by the local cellular telephony provider.